webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of May, 2017.

Disclaimer
Nobody mentioned Rust this week. The Strike Force communications office commented, "They're not even [within] 100 miles. They are not in any place. They hold no place in TIOBE. This is an illusion ... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion."

AI PlaybookMay 15, 2017(comments)
Some bureaucrats have opinions about software. They are characteristically worthless, to the point that even Hackernews recognizes it. Not all of Hackernews, though: about half the comments are people who believe advertisements from genetics startups. Some asshole wants to know if the bureaucrats "accept pull requests." The entire thread is a battleground between people who understand mathematics and people for whom all computational analysis is magic. The mathematicians are vastly outnumbered.

My Family’s SlaveMay 16, 2017(comments)
A magazine publishes a slaveowner's memoir. Hackernews gets together to be sad about their own slaves, and defending the necessity of remaining complicit in human trafficking. Other Hackernews work hard to map the slavedriver/enslaved relationship into their understanding of family dynamics, which appears to have been entirely derived from Donna Reed television shows. As usual, someone blames capitalism, the opposite of which is apparently farming. Many Hackernews explain that housewives are not slaves because they are paid for their services, which is a truly breathtaking misunderstanding of slavery, families, and money, all at the same time.

A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per monthMay 17, 2017(comments)
An internet suddenly finds himself being charged for services by a service provider. Since the provider is in fact Google, it is not normally possible to speak to a human being about the service, but this particular person knows the secret path to customer support: throwing a huge goddamn temper tantrum all over the internet. It works, of course, and Hackernews spends several hours telling stories about when they suddenly found themselves having to pay for things. The rest of the thread is people reassuring each other that Google is not supposed to care about paying customers, and it is best to accept your place as a faceless plebian, deserving of nothing.

Let them paste passwordsMay 18, 2017(comments)
The British government would like you to store secrets in your clipboard, because of how "many" or "most" password managers behave. Hackernews spends a couple days bitching about other web developers, other security administrators, other computer users, and governments. Hackernews is fine though.

Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigationMay 19, 2017(comments)
Sweden has decided Ecuador is a jerk, and has given up attempting to prosecute an attention whore. Hackernews lies to each other for several hours about every possible facet of this completely uninteresting event. Whatsisname's status remains unchanged.

Kill Google AMP before it kills the webMay 20, 2017(comments)
An internet accurately describes Google's AMP program for what it is -- a barely-disguised attempt to shove more of the internet into itself, the better to track the living shit out of every human being on earth. Hackernews has attempted to avoid this program by using it heavily. Half the comments are Hackernews insisting that it is not only impossible to compete with Google in any way but also insane to try. Some Googles show up to assure everyone that this is for the greater good, and if you'd all just stop talking and get in line the whole process will be nearly painless. A few Hackernews suggest that AMP's feature set can be replicated with a "stop shoving every fucking possible line of javascript into every single pageload" approach, but they are quickly chloroformed and edited out of past Christmas photos.